Passenger rail service between Tulsa and Oklahoma City has been an elusive goal for some time, but it’s about to become a reality.
The state transportation department sold the 97.5 mile Sooner Sub line to the Watco Companies last year. Watco said then it would work with Iowa Pacific to offer passenger service on the freight line, and the company has come forward with an idea for six months of trial service.
Representatives from Iowa Pacific shared their plan with Tulsa city councilors Thursday, and if they were hoping for someone enthusiastic to design the trial service between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, they got their wish.
"You can hire a bunch of consultants who can give you 17 inches of paper and tell you whether or not it’ll work, and there will be a cost associated with that. Or you can just go run a train and see if it works," said Matt Abbey with Iowa Pacific. "We’re the second guys."
Abbey gave an aggressive estimate of March 1 for the first trip, though he adds he won’t bet his house on that. Abbey said he’s looking at six round trips per day.
"It is a single-track main line. It’s not an easy piece of railroad to get two different trains past each other going the opposite direction," Abbey said. "We can’t have six or eight or 10 train departures each direction each day without fundamentally shutting the railroad down.
"And we have to remember the underlying freight franchise is the reason the line exists, and it indirectly supports this project because it keeps the line there in a state of good repair."
And there will be motor coaches picking up passengers at the ends of the line in Sapulpa and Midwest City. Total trip time: About three hours.
Abbey said they won’t be running bare-bones buses. Village Tours, the company that worked with Iowa Pacific on an excursion train trip, is renovating its motor coaches.
"We’re going to have a first class and a coach class train, so we should have a first class and a coach class motor coach complete with the onboard video and the Wi-Fi and the coffee maker and a lot of the same appointments you would expect," Abbey said.
Abbey intends for the coaches to stop at several places people may want to travel to the train from.
"We would really like to be able to make a short stop at the downtown city transit center, like to be able to hit the airport, like to be able to hit the university, like to be able to get to Bartlesville," Abbey said.
Even with those perks, some people will probably be disappointed they can’t get on a train in Tulsa and get off the train in Oklahoma City. David Simpson is Iowa Pacific’s government affairs director. He said that’s what they wanted to do.
"But the mechanics of the negotiation and figuring this out and then finding a source of funding to do the capital improvements and then actually getting them into the ground just doesn’t work with the timing that we have for the trial," Simpson said.
The trial has to happen entirely within 2015. Next year, new federal regulations would mandate expensive signal updates Simpson doesn’t think the company can afford for a trial run.
So how much will it cost? Well, the fare structure is still being developed.
"But it’s basically set up on segments, where the customer can pick an origin and a destination and the fare is proportionate," Abbey said. "Bartlesville to Norman will have a different fare than Bristow to Sapulpa. And then, of course, there will be some demand-based fare management as well."
So tickets will probably be more expensive when you and a few hundred of your closest friends hop on the train to attend a Thunder game.
And while Simpson and Abbey couldn’t give a specific number of riders or profits that would make passenger service permanent, Simpson said they know their service will have to improve if it catches on.
"We know that, long term, a good rail service between Oklahoma City and Tulsa is not a three-hour trip where you have to get a connecting shuttle bus into the core downtowns," Simpson said.
The bottom line is if Oklahomans want to be able to one day ride a train from downtown Tulsa to downtown Oklahoma City, they’ll have to start now. Well, March, anyway.
